Arthouse horror month with my wife continues, with this 1972 movie from Brian De Palma. This is one of those movies where figuring out what’s going on is effectively the whole movie, which means that I couldn’t talk about it past the first five minutes without spoiling it, so fuck it, I’m going to just go ahead with spoilers. I don’t particularly recommend this movie, but if for some reason, you haven’t seen it in the last half-century but think you still might, bail out now.

This is a really weird movie and I’m not sure what it’s trying to do.

So for one thing, it starts off with a kind of voyeuristic game show, wherein a woman starts undressing in front of a man she’s seemingly not aware of, and the contestants have to guess whether the guy will keep watching or not. The game show is done in that hyper-manic This Is Pointed Social Commentary style, but… is it? Like, what’s it saying if so — that the audience is implicated in voyeurism and it’s calling them out? This doesn’t have a thing to do with the rest of the movie, so it’s a weird grace note to put at the beginning of a film.

And a grace note is what this scene is, because what it’s doing in terms of the movie’s plot is providing a meet-cute for a couple: The model who played the stripping lady and the dude who was watching her (who turned away in gentlemanly fashion) end up talking on the set and then going out for dinner afterward.

From dinner, they end up going to her place, there’s mysterious stalking from a hyper-creepy looking dude who she says is her ex-husband, and the next morning, the lady is all “oh it’s my and my twin sister’s birthday” and the dude goes off to get a happy-birthday/thanks-for-the-sex cake, which he brings back, and then she stabs him to death.

BUT WAIT, was it she who stabbed him, or her twin sister?

This is where the movie kicks into Rear Window gear, because across the street, a reporter saw this happen through a window, and she calls the police. It’s also where it kicks into Extremely 2020 gear, because it turns out this reporter wrote some pieces about police brutality being bad, so when she calls the police, they’re like “lol okay yeah sure we’re going to come right out any minute now lol.” They do show up… eventually, giving the killers (creepy ex-husband dude comes in to help the lady) hide the body and clean up the blood, so when the police knock on the door, everything’s all fine and they’re like “okay miss lady reporter who thinks the police are bad, we see that you’re full of it, nice try” and call it a day.

(This part of the movie is really the most interesting part, though, because they do a split screen thing, where the left side is following the cops, and the right side following the cleaning-up killers, and there’s the tension of not only the timeline, but also a couple of near-miss encounters that we see coming from both sides of a corner. The split-screen thing even goes on once they get to the apartment, so you get to see the same exact conversation from two angles at once. Most movies would do this via fast cuts back and forth, but I kind of love the split-screen thing, and want more directors to use this.)

So now the woman is going to go off on her own to prove that this murder happened, but… does it really weirdly, and instead of feeling like a Hitchcock movie, it veers off into nearly Lynchian territory. She hires a private detective, who follows movers as they are hired to move a sofa (into which the body was concealed, which he realizes quickly to be the case); he will follow them for the whole movie as they go to Canada, which’ll be a lot of time in the movie and surely will pay off in major ways by the end, right?

Meanwhile, she starts researching who this lady is, and what’s the deal with her sister, which takes her to a newspaper guy who wrote a profile of this lady one time, because it turns out that she’s half of a famous conjoined twin pair… BUT THE OTHER TWIN IS DEAD.

Then she follows the creepy guy to what turns out to be a ridiculously poorly run mental hospital (like, sure, it’s perfectly fine to let a patient who has no conception of reality have a giant hedge clipper and go outside at night, that seems like responsible management), where the creepy guy has her involuntarily committed under false pretenses, and then hypnotizes her into believing he’s innocent.

Meanwhile, the surviving-twin lady — whose motive, btw, we are now supposed to have figured out is that she’s the Evil Twin, like in that Simpsons Halloween episode where they keep Bart’s evil twin in the attic — kills the doctor, whose motivations throughout this have honestly been kind of inexplicable anyway. Like, he’s evil, sure, but do his actions really make any sense at all?

So that’s the climactic action sequence, which is a little weird in that it mostly involved two bad guys fighting while our hero lay there in semi-consciousness, and now we go to the Hitchcockian denouement where it’ll all be explained… but because the reporter was hypnotized, she now insists to the police that there never was an original crime and there is no body, and the police are frustrated that she is recanting her story for no obvious reason.

So what about the body? Well, literally the last scene of the movie is the sofa sitting at a rail depot with that private detective spying on it to see who picks it up. Credits. So, uh, his whole plotline is a dead-end that goes nowhere, but takes up a lot of screen time. Okay, cool!

I am torn between thinking that the constant subversion of narrative logic is intentional, and that De Palma was trying to make an absurdist take on a Hitchcock thriller; and thinking that he just kept trying to throw in shocking twists and surprises, and didn’t intend for it to end up as nonsense. I kinda suspect the latter, but who knows.

I am curious, though, as to whether the “one half of a conjoined twin pair is evil” thing originated here, or if that has a longer tradition, and this is just using that hoary trope. Either way, I think the movie’s “freak show” attitude is probably not something you’d see in modernity, although then again, modernity has a way of disappointing expectations, so who knows.

Long story short, this movie is only ninety minutes or so, but somehow feels longer than that. It’s interesting, which isn’t nothing, and arguably that tense split screen scene is worth the price of admission on its own; but I think the movie is ultimately not successful in whatever the heck it was trying to do.